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Two more reports now suggest that social media as an alternative to email is not growing as fast as it should: Radicati Group’s latest industry survey and informal research from Brian Solis. This despite the fact that Facebook and Twitter usage continues to grow. Meanwhile for business, as IBM found, email is still the preferred media. Even although the IBM study found that 48% of respondents felt they suffered from email overload.
Why is this? One explanation might be the Generation X and Y. By and large business is still tilted towards more Generation X employees many of whom are not comfortable with social media and have not been educated how to use it properly. A second explanation might be that all alerts about new information on social media/social networks still comes by email. This in turn drives up the email traffic. One way to manage this aspect of email overload is to create rules to divert all such alerts away from the inbox and to a folder.
However that still leaves the need to educate Generation X.
What do you think?
Tags: email management, email overload, email stress
How serious is email overload? What is the cost of email overload? A recent survey by Silicon.com found that 24% of business users receive over 100 emails a day and 7% receive over 250. Can anyone seriously cope with this volume of email each day? Those with such a high volume of email traffic are suffering from either serious email overload or email addiction. We might like to think we need and can process all this information but I’d suggest there is a very high risk of missing some key emails buried in the blizzard.
For most of us 80% of the information we need comes from 20% of what we read. Which is the 20% of the emails you receive that you need?
Email overload carries a high cost to individuals and business. First, there is the shear waste of time and personal productivity – to see the cost use my Cost of Email Misuse calculator. Then there is the stress factor, unnecessary demands on the email system, long working hours to clear them all and high carbon footprint to process all the email traffic.
Email overload can be managed and reduce with some subtle but simple changes in email behavior such as learning to say ‘no’ and reducing the number of emails sent. For more ideas see my column next week on Silicon.Com.
More on how to deal with the email addiction later this week.
Tags: email management, email overload, silicon.com
We’re passionate about helping you avoid email overload and ensure that your email etiquette gets you the right answers, when you need them.
Look out for lots of posts with helpful hints and tips, along with discussions around some of the subjects covered in the recently launched Brilliant Email book, available on Amazon.
Tags: email etiquette, email overload